France

It was late spring and Creole wanted another test facility, this time in the south of France. Nothing like being in Europe in the springtime and being paid to build a building that you have built three other times. Oh yea, Cannes Film Festival would be going on during construction.

Several twist on this project verses the other Creole test facilities. The first was a parking garage to be included. Another twist, the local labor force was union and with the timing of the film festival created created a shortage of skilled labor and union frowned on importing labor. As always, to me the job was the most important. Since I couldn't get local labor I did import it. The final twist was Creole had a French partner.

The parking garage turned out to be the least of my worries. I settled on a precast design with the supplier in Paris giving me a turnkey product. This garage was round and they claimed the foundations would take a week to form and pour, the precast set in a day, and a lightweight topping slab finished in two days. My original thoughts was that this was totally B S.

To reaffirm that I am a person of logic. If it seems logical I can buy in to it. If it doesn't seem logical it is very difficult for me to buy. That's me, that's the way I am. So when Creole told me the next test facility was to be in Nice, France. I did my research and found that this was the most illogical place to put one of their facilities for testing and re-building turbine engines for off-shore oil wells. Especially since there was no oil (off shore or on shore) in the north Mediterranean region.

In 1981 the closest established wells were Libya. Just a few years earlier they started drilling off the Canary Islands, and of course there was the USSR in the Black Sea. I figured out that since this was France with a French company owning over fifty percent of the partnership with Creole, it technically was a French company. Remember, this was before sanctions against Libya I still couldn't belief Nice.

My first encounter with the French people was at De Gaulle in Paris. Of course people in most airports aren't very friendly. The people encountered at Nice Cote d'Azur Airport was just the opposite. It was more like flying into Kansas City or Nashville. These people bent over backwards to help you and didn't show any resentment in my lack of French. I can still remember laughing when I called the desk to check on my flight and I heard in a deep southern accent “Air France y'all, how can I help ya.” Several years later I heard a comedian say about the same in a skit except he was talking about Air France out of Louisville.

Arriving in early April it was cool but it had a subtropical appearance. I noticed the usual palms, eucalyptus and the citrus trees but there was a broad leaf evergreen shrub that I don't think I ever saw before. These broad leaf evergreens proved to be a problem when we cleared the site, in the end we recycled them. This was fifteen years before recycling began.

It is always warming to be in a distant city and see someone you know. Martha Borgeston was at the airport to pick me up. Her and Luther had been in town for two weeks while I was finishing up the preconstruction details. Luther was meeting with the local construction union so I saw her smiling face waiting at the gang way.

In upcoming blogs I want to decribe the parking garage, “The Chariots of Fire”, and the trip to Paris.